Should Hillary Clinton take ‘hard, historic road’ to White House?

Let me finish tonight with this story out there about Hillary Clinton for vice president.
The way to look at this is “politically.”
If Hillary Clinton wants to be president in an active sense - meaning she wants to make the right moves to get there, “all” the right moves - a number of options apply.
One, she stays where she is and plays a big role in a Mideast peace deal. That, history shows, is Nobel Prize territory. If a deal gets cut involving Netanyahu and Abbas, the U.S. secretary of state, especially one who was senator from New York, will get and deserve a huge share of the political credit.
Okay, that’s one route. She achieves victory as secretary of state, stays through this presidential term and returns to private life, perhaps heading up a university and running for President from there. It worked for Ike. He was president of Columbia before running for President.
Another route: she becomes secretary of defense, stays through 2012 or 13, heads out and runs for president from that position. Having headed up the U.S. military, she would have proven bona fides for commander-in-chief. A presidential campaign with that behind her would be totally different than the one she ran in 2007-2008.
Options Three and Four: President Obama names her as his running mate in 2012. The ticket either wins or loses.
If it wins, she gets the challenging task of carrying on Obama-style Democratic rule for twelve consecutive years - a tough row to hoe. She would run as the chosen successor to Obama - taking with it all the baggage of eight years in office.
Option four: the Obama-Clinton ticket loses. In this case she would have a free hand to run in 2016. The problem is she’d be forced to run against an incumbent Republican president.
It’s fascinating, isn’t it? And every one of these four options is in plain sight. We can imagine her staying on and winning a Mideast peace, imagine her getting picked for defense chief. We can certainly imagine, all of us, her accepting the running-mate role and taking her chances.
Right now I’m betting on Option One. That’s because I have never seen a better US team working for peace in the Middle East, never seen the two sides so determined to take this seriously. As hard as it is to do, I’d place my bet on her taking the hard, historic road to the White House, not the easy one, because the hard road takes her through the “front door.”